TSCH and 6TiSCH

This tutorial will guide you through using TSCH and 6TiSCH (see doc:tsch). We will start from the hello-world example with the shell enabled (see tutorial:shell) and with MAC logs set to the maximum level (LOG_CONF_LEVEL_MAC set to LOG_LEVEL_DBG, see tutorial:logging). For existing examples using TSCH, see Contiki-NG TSCH example applications.

To enable TSCH, all you need to do is to set it as the MAC layer in the project Makefile:

MAKE_MAC = MAKE_MAC_TSCH

This will configure the system for TSCH, and if IPv6 and RPL is enabled (which is the default case), will also setup 6TiSCH, i.e. configure the network for smooth interaction between TSCH and IPv6. By default, it runs the 6TiSCH minimal schedule with slotframe length of TSCH_SCHEDULE_DEFAULT_LENGTH (use viewconf to find out your configuration).

As you have modified the Makefile, you need to clean:

$ make distclean

Compile your example again. Depending on the platform you are using, enabling TSCH and the shell might result in a too large RAM or ROM footprint. Read this tutorial to mitigate the issue: tutorial:ram-rom-usage. Now program two nodes, and pick one that you will use as coordinator. From the shell, set the node as RPL root; doing that will also automatically set it as TSCH coordinator, while the opposite is not true:

> rpl-set-root 1

The node will create a TSCH network and start advertising it through Enhanced Beacons (EBs). The other node should be scanning on all active channels. Once it receives an EB, it should join the network. Note that this can take a while, depending on the EB period (see TSCH_EB_PERIOD and TSCH_MAX_EB_PERIOD) and the channel hopping sequence (see TSCH_DEFAULT_HOPPING_SEQUENCE and TSCH_JOIN_HOPPING_SEQUENCE). In the default settings, it can take up to a few minutes.

On the other node, type tsch-status to check if the node has joined the network yet:

> tsch-status
TSCH status:
-- Is coordinator: 0
-- Is associated: 1
-- PAN ID: 0xabcd
-- Is PAN secured: 0
-- Join priority: 1
-- Time source: 0012.4b00.0616.0fcc
-- Last synchronized: 3 seconds ago
-- Drift w.r.t. coordinator: 4 ppm

Nodes should now be able to ping one another, as in tutorial:ipv6-ping. You can enable TSCH logs from the shell to find out more about how TSCH operates. When setting the log level to the maximum (LOG_LEVEL_DBG, or 4), TSCH will output detailed per-log slots. These come from the tsch-log.[ch] module, which saves key information in every slot and dumps it over serial as soon as it can do so without interfering with TSCH timings. To interpret the logs, read doc:tsch-logs. To disable the logs at runtime, try log mac 0 in the shell.

You can run TSCH transparently with RPL (tutorial:rpl and tutotiral:rpl-border-router). Note than whenever a node is set as RPL root, it will automatically become a TSCH coordinator.